An eight-page article in the NY Times today addresses the latest research in what is said to be ‘postfeminist sexology.’ I’m not going to try to summarize the material, but I’d recommend reading and saving the article. It may be the research is at a very early stage and a lot may change soon, but it’s already addressing questions in a way that readers may find increases their understanding of themselves. At the same time, the research is to some extent involved in an idea of sex as a biological phenomenon, and some readers will think the most important questions hardly get a look in.
So let me take one example: it appears that women respond with increased blood flow to the vagina in response to a wider range of stimuli than men do, but that there also seems to be a far greater discrepancy between such arousal and experienced desire. There is a much closer correlation between arousal and felt desire in men.
Now I can remember somewhat similar results being taken to show that women are just not as self-aware, etc. That isn’t the kind of explanation this more sophisticated research is looking at. Here’s one alternative explanation: vaginal arousal has a protective function, since it makes penetration less likely to damage one. So vaginal arousal may be cued to the presence of sex, not the presence of desire. Importantly, this would mean that a woman’s body’s being prepared for sex is no indication of willingness.
Another hypothesis is that what for women sexual desire may be particularly reacting to is being desired, a feature whose erotic power may not have much longevity to it.
If you read the article, do remember that it’s written by someone who is himself an outsider to the research. And of course, thinking about different factors that may enter into the construction of women’s sexuality is enormously difficult. Still and all, there are new perspectives on the topics.
Feminist Philosophers 
I’ve only allowed myself to read one page of the comments, but thought this one was particularly pertinent:
“The article posits that women have a wider range of arousal and stimuli. Rather than ask the question – Why are women so open to different sexual stimuli? We could ask the question: Why are men limited to so few sources of arousal?
Not, what do women want? But rather, why do men want so little?
This groundbreaking research is built on the old, sexist idea of “The Other Sex.” This assumption that women are abnormal (as compared to men) is ridiculous. Assuming that women are the norm and men are limited and abnormal would result in a completely different set of research questions.
— mary, Chicago”
I don’t know what “postfeminist” sexology means, but I thought the article was interesting.
It reminded me of another article in the NYTimes about similar research from 2005: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/05/health/05sex.html. The research described in the 2005 article focused only on men. The interesting finding was supposedly that whereas gay and straight men reacted with physiological arousal only to “erotic movies” featuring the sex they reported being attracted to. But bisexual men had a discrepancy between who they reported being attracted to (men and women) vs. which movies they reacted to with physiological arousal (either those with men or those with women, but not both).
The article implies that bisexuality (at least in men) simply doesn’t exist and that bisexual men are just lying (the title of the article is “Straight, Gay, or Lying?”). Only later in the article is it pointed out that the study was very small (90 men total) or is it suggested that perhaps sexual orientation is more complicated than merely what kinds of images make blood flow to the penis. (I’m also curious about what these movies were like—were they images of sex scenes between members of the same-sex? Were they images of individual people masturbating? Of individual people sitting around naked?)
What I find interesting about looking at the two studies in tandem is that you’ve got very similar data (in some people subjective and objective arousal lines up and in some people it doesn’t) but two very different explanations of it. In the study on men, it’s assumed that there is no difference between subjective/objective arousal (the professor who conducted the research says outright that, at least for men, orientation = physiological arousal), hence the explanation for the discrepancy is that some people are lying. In this newer research on both men and women, there is no suggestion that women might be lying. This is odd. Why is it more plausible that men are lying about being bisexual than that women are lying about being straight or lesbian? (Of course, I think Mary also makes a good point about how differences btw men and women are always framed in terms of women being the odd ones and men being normal.)
I think the answer is: because we already have a pretty strong societal background assumption that bisexuality doesn’t exist. This tidbit of data seems to confirm that assumption, so why question it? Of course it would seem more plausible that an already suspect group of people—bisexuals—are lying, than that people are just different in how orientation/arousal/physiology works. But women as a group aren’t generally suspected of lying about *not* being bisexual. So they explanation of the discrepancy that says that women are just lying doesn’t fit in to our preconceived notions about women; hence there’s motivation to look for another explanation—that there must really be something different about men and women
I wonder also if these latest studies included any non-straight/gay men or women in the studies and what the results were. (I think pre-op trans people were mentioned at one point, but I didn’t see any mention of bisexuals or others who are attracted to more than one sex.) If bisexual men still reported a difference in physiological arousal level vs. subjective arousal level, then that would throw a wrench in the explanation that women and men are different—because not *all* men would be the same.
“it appears that women respond with increased blood flow to the vagina in response to a wider range of stimuli than men do …”
This does not surprise me, and for good reason. :D
The very last thing I want to do is to defend a pop piece on women’s sexuality, since it is likely to contain the sorts of errors that are being said to be there.
But I’m not sure these particular errors are there. I hate the idea of pronoucing on the facts, so please take as this as very tentative. Also, let me be clear, I skimmed through the article.
So, taking them in reverse order, let me float the idea in response to philfemgal that the cases are less similar than her description captures. For women you have: arousal+desire.report and arousal-desire.report; for guys you got desire.report+arousal and desire.report-arousal. Further, if I remember correctly, you have arousal-desire.report for women in all sorts of cases where you wouldn’t think that a woman would want what was arousing, you get this consistently across women, and so on. In the male case, however, you don’t have the desire.report-arousal except in one sort of case; it is not at all common for gay and straight men to have that gap, and bisexual men have it in only one area. That might lead researchers to treat the cases as very different.
I certainly agree, though, that the researchers had a narrow view of what could be going on in the bi case. There are all sorts of intense desires that don’t start out as sexual but which could become sexual in sexual circumstances, I would have thought.
BrevisMus, that wasn’t how I read the research at all. The idea was to try to study female sexuality; I didn’t see male sexuality as presenting the norm. For all we know, the researchers were congratulaitng themselves on not having to deal with the narrow and boring male sexuality; far from being a norm, it isn’t interesting enough to study.
What the article as a whole seems to suggest is that there might be reasons why women need to be aroused by more things than they desire, whereas men do not (almost ever). For women, arousal provides some protection from injury and for men it doesn’t.
I love new ideas and for me that’s a whole new idea, one that could explain quite various facts in women’s reactions, some of which can be very puzzling or distressing.
Source
The use of this device on transsexual women is particularly problematic: the proper control group would be non-transsexual women who have also had radical pelvic reconstruction
While not exactly fitting the category of “fraudulent” or “junk” science, its use is extremely limited for quantitative research. Far better techniques, such as fMRI imaging exist, many of whose results directly contradict the conclusions from relying on this device alone.
i really like your blog! i read it often thx! keep the goodwork up
Thanks, Zoe, that’s an important caveat.
I was hoping you folks would remark on this article! I found the article interesting because it did not simply mime the usual explanations – men are attracted to curvy women with a certain hip-waist ratio; women are attracted to men who have power/money; women are attracted to the color pink because of gathering berries or reading faces (as if all berries are red and all faces are white) – you get the idea. The plus for me was that the writer interviewed three different women researchers who had three quite distinct pictures of women’s sexuality due to the particular data they worked with. And each seemed at least plausible (given what we know).
Even still, I wished that these kinds of articles reproduced the methodological uncertainty that the scientists themselves express about their research. It would perhaps help mitigate this desire to fix things, especially the identity “woman,” so absolutely.
sk, I agree about methodological uncertainty. I went to psyinfo articles to look the topic up, and immediately found one by Chivers, who is interviewed in the article. There’s an easy transition she makes from the statistical correlations, well below 100%, and unqualified remarks about causal relations.
She does in effect answer some of ZoeBrain’s concerns. In particular, she does remarks that her research using
plethysmography is in accord with other research methods, including fMRI. I certainly can’t assess the validity of her work or her references, but she does appear to be working in a tradition that’s sustained very heavy peer review.
ZoeBrain, your souce is discussing using the technique in diagnosing single cases, and the standards there are very different. We wouldn’t want 62% accuracy to determine an individual case, but when chance is at 25%, 62% is a significant correlation for a group.
philfemgal, I realize now that one should look at what the correlations are in the bi case; I don’t think I’ll do that, but it might mitigate the confidence with which I replied to your remark. Well, apparent confidence.
Some further interesting commentary…
Peter D. Kramer:
“[Since] it’s largely men who are paraphiliacs, people with odd or deviant sexual desires […] shouldn’t women, whose desires arise from the imagination, have the broader range of sexual interests?”
http://blogs.psychologytoday.com/blog/in-practice/200901/perversion-and-the-mystery-sexual-desire
William Saletan (see also his suggested links):
“The challenge is to explain the data on rape fantasies and arousal from sexual assault, given that nobody literally wants to be raped. What part of rape or the idea of rape is arousing? And what part of the woman is aroused?”
http://www.slate.com/blogs/blogs/humannature/archive/2009/01/26/rape-fantasies-and-female-arousal.aspx
Thanks, Rob. I hopped over to the Saletan article and found he refers to a discussion here:
http://www.slate.com/blogs/blogs/xxfactor/archive/tags/New+York+Times+Magazine/default.aspx
I’m not sure it is all that enlightening, and I’d be interested to know what people think of the Freudian reading of the article; I find that sort of reaction highly problematic.
I don’t see why the Freudian reading of the article (especially as it is a reading of the article, and not the research, and as the author invited the comparison by referencing Freud in the opening paragraphs) is necessarily more problematic than some of the purportedly more scientific claims made in the article, for instance.
Reading back over it (and the discussion of it over at Pandagon), I have a few more questions:
I wonder if we can hold on to a certain suspicion about claims that the researchers interviewed or the research done is “post-feminist,” whatever that means, especially since one of the researchers explicitly identifies as a feminist.
I wonder also if we may continue to be suspicious of claims about how such research represents the desire of women in general, for a couple of reasons. First, as there may be issues with the sample, and secondly. lesbians often seem to react differently than heterosexual women in the findings of all three researchers, though I hope we can assume that they are still women!
Lastly, I found the explanation of the discrepancy in (heterosexual) women’s desire that relied on the concept of narcissism to be problematic; narcissism has a specific definition and function, but I think that it’s being deployed here in a more generalized way, which may continue the pathologization of womens’ sexuality. Also, what she describes as narcissism is nicely critiqued by de Beauvoir, sixty years ago, as a function of a patriarchal culture in which women are meant to *be desired,* to be passively looked at, and are in no case meant to *desire.* Which may also go a long way towards explaining “rape fantasties,” as well.
Anyway, interesting discussion; I’m glad this is being talked about here and all over the ‘tubes!
sk, I agree with your criticisms. I don’t think “post-feminism” is explained at all. The term might be an interesting replacement for “feminism.” “postfeminism” could be feminism without the negative connotations.
I take the Freudian reading to say (roughly): well, he didn’t find a single answer to “what do women want” and maybe that’s because he didn’t want to.
This sort of reading seems to me obviously objectionable when it’s applied to all sorts of situations, as therapists did at least for years with women: For example,
-she says she wants to get out of a brutal marriage, but maybe she really likes it and wants to be beaten up.
– She says she is very anxious not to get pregnant while she is doing her PhD, but the anxiety indicates to me that she is really anxious to get pregnant.
– She says she has worked on Kant because she thinks he is the best philosopher in that area, but really she just wants to beat up on some man.
The idea that we should put aside the fact that he did all this work which takes the academic field to have failed to converge on some simple single answer (like many, many others in the social sciences/social neurosciences) AND then appeal to his supposed desires about finding women complex seems to me not good. Among other things, there a vast wealth of research being done on non-conscious influences in today’s science and I don’t any of it condones the simple interpretive rules Freud dreamed up. Worse still, it dismisses the significance of what the women are doing. We’re just to look at the report in terms of the supposedly hidden male desire.
Arrgghhhh!!!!!!!!!!
Charlie Rose interview (22 min.) with Chivers and Bergner:
http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/10181